This story is maddening. Bessemer city officials are signing NDAs about a proposed hyperscale data center that will require destroying 100 acres of forest, use 90x as much energy as all homes of the city, & threaten a newly discovered species with extinction.
100 acres is less than a sixth of a square mile, and Bessemer City doesn’t use a ton of electricity, being as rural as it is.
The endangered species is more concerning, but feels solvable if they use environmentally conscious design practices with regards to the waterway.
Idk, I think that new data centers are something of a “necessary evil” in our modern society, and they have to be built somewhere.
Sure, new data centers are a necessary evil that have to be built somewhere, but ……
What’s in it for the town?
- are they claiming jobs? Like 12?
- are they claiming a new water system for everyone? At whose cost?
- will this benefit the community in some way?
- is there excess power that needs to be used?
Sure they should be somewhere but how about somewhere with the infrastructure to support it? Somewhere already developed?
Don’t do it. Water is an increasingly precious resource and giving away a states worth of water and power to a data center is not worth the money.
“Were so bad our jobs otherwise, now we’re desperate.”
Documents show that the energy and water projected to be consumed by the data center campus are staggering. If built to full capacity, the Bessemer data center campus could consume around 10.5 million megawatt hours of energy per year, based on estimates provided to residents by representatives of the data center development.
That’s more than 90 times the amount of energy used by all residences in Bessemer annually, according to figures from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
That’s half the annual generation of the largest power plant in the US.
A recent regulatory filing by county officials estimated that water usage by the facility could amount to 2 billion gallons per day. That’s more than five times the entire state’s daily residential usage, according to government figures.
I have to admit this can be only horseshit. I don’t want to be an apologist.
Here another slightly older figure: That’s the entire daily fresh groundwater use of the entire US.
